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Poet Marshals His Moral Passion Against the War

PRINCETON, N.J. - The poetry of C.K. Williams is the antidote to patriotic jingoism, moral smugness and the imbecility of the easily amused. His fierce, unrelenting moral spotlight, turned unflinchingly on himself and the world around him, however, has intensified with war and terrorism. "It is hard to write about something else, although I do" he says of the war in Iraq and what he sees as an assault on American democracy. "I feel sometimes I should be writing about other things, but I keep coming back to what is happening to us."

Mr. Williams, 68, known as Charlie to his friends, spends half his year in France and half teaching at Princeton University. He is finishing editing his collected poems, which will be published next year, and reigns, after years in relative obscurity, as one of the nation's leading poets.

He grew up in a poor family in Newark, although his father later became a wealthy businessman. His mother, he says, was "a businessman's wife."

Mr. Williams's passions in high school were "girls and basketball," in that order. Standing 6 feet 5 inches tall, he was recruited as a basketball prospect to Bucknell University. It was a miserable freshman year. He "got tired of basketball" and found the Pennsylvania countryside "lonely and depressing." He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. His other passion, undiminished, led him to attempt to impress a date with a love poem. "It was an abominable poem," he said with a laugh, "but she liked it."

He decided he wanted to be a poet. Poets, as he imagined them, lived in garrets in Paris where they ruminated about life and lived in genteel poverty. A bit of suffering would not hurt. So he dropped out of school, got some money from his father and moved into a small hotel on the Left Bank. He unpacked his typewriter and set it on a table. The muse he had expected to guide him never arrived.

"Fortunately, there was an English bookstore close by and I began to read everything," he says. "I spent five months in Paris. I wrote nothing worth speaking about, other than a ton of letters, but I read a lot." He read enough to know what he did not know. He returned to the University of Pennsylvania, chastened, but also determined to "learn something, to learn poetry."

"It was an incredibly important time," he says, "not much happened and yet my life began then. I discovered the limits of loneliness."

In the late 60's and early 70's, he started his career, as a fiery antiwar poet, using his lyricism to damn those whom he believed had plunged the country into an indefensible conflict. When his daughter was born in 1969, the killing of children in Vietnam unleashed within him "an incredible fury about the evil in the world." His 1972 collection of antiwar poems, "I Am the Bitter Name," however, coincided with the breakup of his first marriage and a bout with depression that made him consider abandoning poetry. He supported himself by helping lead group therapy sessions, writing reviews and ghost writing. Success, at least success as defined by popular poets like Allen Ginsberg, eluded him, but also kept him focused on his craft. He began to write in long lines, something many critics consider the principal innovation of his poetry.

"It is always there," he says of his outrage, "but it is more subliminal and is no longer on the surface. I do not want to be dogmatic."

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HE began teaching in 1975, first at a Y.M.C.A. in Philadelphia and later at Drexel University and Franklin and Marshall College. He translated Sophocles' "Women of Trachis" and Euripides' "Bacchae."' He attracted notice, winning nearly every major poetry award, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and the National Book Award in 2003.

His poems, rich in imagery, often challenge American pretensions of goodness and virtue. He denounced the abandonment of the weak and the poor and the callousness of the moneyed class. He is ruthless in exposing his own sins, and helps us uncover our own. It was the war in Iraq, however, that led him to circle back to where he had started.

"The unreasonableness of war, the killing of children, drives me to distraction," he says. "My moral system grows out of this. There has never been a moment in my life when I felt we were in so much danger. I am a father and a grandfather. I have three grandsons. I am afraid for them."

He leaves Princeton in the summer and fall to live in an isolated house in France. He does carpentry and plumbing and explains the process of installing a new toilet. His wife, Catherine Mauger, who is French and whom he met in 1973, is a jeweler. They have a son who is a painter.

He unfolds a piece of paper with a poem called "Shrapnel." He lays it out with his long fingers on a table at a Princeton restaurant.

There are photos as well -- one shows a

father rushing through the street, his face

torn with a last frantic hope,

His son in his arms, rag-limp, chest and

abdomen speckled with deep, dark gashes

and smears of blood,

Propaganda's function, of course, is

exaggeration: the facts are there, though,

the child is there . . . or not there.

PUBLIC LIVES Correction: January 19, 2005, Wednesday The Public Lives profile on Thursday, about C. K. Williams, an antiwar poet who teaches at Princeton and whose subject of late has been the war in Iraq, misidentified the organization where he began his teaching career in Philadelphia in 1975. It was the Y.M./Y.W.H.A., not the Y.M.C.A.

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A version of this article appears in print on January 13, 2005, on Page B00004 of the National edition with the headline: PUBLIC LIVES; Poet Marshals His Moral Passion Against the War. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe